About me

Hi, I’m Alba👋🏼

I’m a Health Behavior Psychologist and Coach specialized in helping people build a consistent, healthy lifestyle and improve their relationship with food, exercise and themselves.

My work revolves around one single question:

Why do we sometimes know exactly what we need to do to become the kind of person we want to be, and still, we sabotage ourselves?

That question has shaped both my personal journey and my professional career.

How it started

I’ve been curious about the human mind and wellbeing since I was a teenager, and that curiosity became personal early on.

I grew up watching people close to me struggle with their habits, giving in to immediate pleasures at the expense of their health. I saw how hard it can be to change when you don’t truly see the value of that change.

I wanted to help, but I couldn’t. So that stayed with me.

Later, I got deeply into fitness and nutrition and became determined to become the leanest and strongest version of myself.

And I did.
But the road wasn’t as simple as knowing what to eat, how to train or having enough discipline.

My standards were high, and along the way I started facing many of the same challenges I had seen in others: food cravings, lack of motivation, emotional reactions, moments where I would fall off track, and the frustration of knowing what I wanted to do but not always being able to do it.

That was when I realized something that would eventually become the foundation of my work:

Knowledge and discipline are not enough.

Becoming my own experiment

Instead of simply pushing harder, I became my own experiment. I started paying attention to what behavior change actually feels like beyond the theory I was studying in university back then.

And I realized a life-changing lesson: sustainable change isn’t about constantly fighting yourself, suppressing emotions or trying to develop endless willpower. It is about learning how to make space for your thoughts and emotions while making intelligent changes in your environment, your daily actions and, ultimately, your identity.

And that’s why I do what I do today: combining psychology with fitness in order to help people who truly want to change but struggle to do it consistently, close the gap between knowing and doing, so that they can finally get the energy, the health and the physique that they desire.

My transformation

  • 2015 - I didn't know anything

    I had a strong sweet tooth and I was constantly eating out in unhealthy restaurants. I had the same habits as of most of my family and friends. I hated exercise and PE was a difficult subject for me in school. When I started living on my own for university, the meals I cooked were very nutritionally poor with a lot of processed ingredients and barely any veggies.

  • 2017 - I started training

    I felt in love with weight training and developed a basic habit to workout. I also went running from time to time. But then my uni days started and I started drinking a lot and eating a lot of processed foods. I gained weight. I was 62kg. Although this is not severely overweight, I felt insecure of my body and wanted to change it, but I was stuck with the poor habits of everyone else around me.

  • 2020 - I took it seriously

    I started to take my health goals seriously. I wanted to lose fat and build muscle. I learned a lot about exercise and nutrition for fat loss and started to apply it to myself. I was training 5 times per week at the gym and starting to lift heavier. I improved my nutrition but I still had strong sweet cravings and occasional food binges so I didn’t look as lean as I wanted. That triggered my curiosity for understanding the psychology behind the behaviors that would lead me to my goal.

  • 2023 - I took it too seriously

    After years of experimenting with fitness principles and my knowledge on psychology, I became the leanest version of myself. I was lifting heavily 5 times per week and giving fitness classes as a gym instructor. I weighted 52kg. I was quite happy with my body, but I also remember thinking back then that it was not enough. My diet had more veggies and fruits, but it was also very restrictive, plain and repetitive. I lost my period from all the stress I was unconsciously placing on my body.

  • 2026 - I achieved balance

    I figured out why I lost my period so I rebuilt my relationship with my habits. I started to eat more and intelligently. My recipes became more nutritious, varied and tastier. I finally found the overlap between healthy and delicious. This, in addition to my knowledge and experience on the psychology of eating behavior, led me to heal my relationship with food. Sugar cravings disappeared. I included other types of exercise in my routine and started to train to feel more agile and healthy. Today, I know how to maintain a lean and fit body with a healthy weight, my body image is positive and I feel vital and energized.

My background

  • Bachelor of Science in Psychology (University of Aberdeen)

  • Master’s in Third Generation Psychotherapies (Valencian International University)

  • Master’s in Social, Health and Organizational Psychology, specialization in the Health Track (Utrecht University)

  • Specialized Training in the Psychology of Eating Behavior

  • Active IQ Level 2 & 3 Certificates in Fitness Instructing and Personal Training

  • National Board Certified Health & Wellness Coach (NBHWC)

Professionally, through Health Essence and my collaborations with health and wellbeing companies, I have worked and still work with people providing individual consultations, group sessions and educational workshops on eating behavior, motivation, stress, emotional regulation and sustainable lifestyle habits.

My approach

My role is not to tell people what diet or what training plan to follow.
Most people already know that they should eat well, exercise, sleep enough and manage stress.

My work focuses on identifying the psychological, emotional and behavioral patterns behind someone’s habits and helping them change those patterns in a practical way.

My approach is integrative and combines evidence based principles from:

Acceptance & Commitment Therapy (ACT)

Learning to stop fighting thoughts and emotions and act in line with what genuinely matters.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)

Understanding how thoughts, emotions and behavior influence each other and restructuring automatic old patterns.

Internal Family Systems (IFS)

Understanding internal conflicts as different parts of ourselves that serve a function and need to be acknowledged and integrated rather than fought against.

I apply these approaches in a practical, non-clinical way, together with principles from health psychology, nutrition, exercise and behavioral science.

Motivational Interviewing (MI)

Helping people discover their own reasons for change and strengthen their internal motivation rather than imposing change from the outside.

What makes my work different

I am not a therapist treating psychological disorders, and I am not a fitness coach giving people training or nutrition plans.

I work in the space between those two worlds.

I am an applied behavioral psychologist focused on helping people understand why they struggle to follow through on what they already know and giving them the psychological skills and behavioral systems to change it.

Because ultimately, changing your habits is not about becoming better at forcing yourself to behave.

It is about becoming the kind of person for whom a healthy lifestyle feels natural.